The I Ching, or Book of Changes, is an ancient Chinese oracle, used for divination. It's a kind of compilation/ecosystem of Taoist wisdom and more recent Confucian ideas. But what it is to me is, first and foremost an extraordinary work of poetry, a structure in which the dark and the light, the yin and the yang, the seasons of the year, and the oppositions within everything, create the ever-flowing, circular movements of life - from creation, to stasis, to destruction, to nothingness, to creation, and back again. And it all happens in words.
The book has been a constant companion to me throughout my life, and but it was only about a year ago that it occurred to me that I could enter into the dialogue and step into the dance. I started to write '64 Changes', entering into each of the 64 hexagrams in the oracle, and allowing its energy, essence, and paradox to infuse my words.
The journey continues – I'm disciplining myself to move in the order of the hexagrams, without jumping ahead to an 'easy one' that inspires me more. So I'm
going slowly – and it feels like digging in deep, rich soil, soil with water, fire and air in it.
The first two hexagrams/poems are The Creative and The Receptive, the two basic energies of life, that you can map onto masculine and feminine, active and passive, or whatever you like really. Everything which exists is an expression of these energies and when one reaches its peak, a tipping point, it collapses into the other, which rises.
Have a read of 'The Creative' as part of POETRY, here on the website. I hope you experience something.
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